Newsletters

In addition to our regular news stories, each
month FSFE issues a newsletter that summarises its
most important activities.

Subscribe to FSFE's monthly newsletter

2016-12-08
This year, the FSFE celebrated its 15th birthday. 15 years of empowering users, supporting communities, and pushing for better legislation. 15 years during which we saw that all activities, even if considered small at the time, can become big when we work together. 15 years during which we saw that that all activities, even if considered impossible at the time, can succeed when we stand together. Together, we have even succeeded against the heaviest lobbying of large interest groups. All of this would not have been possible without the continuous support of our community, contributing thousands of hours of their work time and backing us financially. If you are a frequent reader of our newsletter, and you like our work but you are not yet part of our community ... then consider joining the FSFE!
Read...

2016-11-09Since 2005, the FSFE has maintained two distinct
brands: the FSFE and our Fellowship. While this made sense initially,
we've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way this created a
separation between the Fellows and the FSFE as two separate entities,
despite the fact that we're all working together! Accordingly, we've reduced our
activities promoting the "Fellowship" as something distinct from the FSFE,
and now talk more about "FSFE Groups" rather than "Fellowship Groups", for our
local groups.
Read...

2016-10-06
After some changes to the FSFE's internship program in early
September, we're happy to be able to announce an opening for a
technical intern
with the FSFE. We're seeking an intern who can work with us for three months
in our Berlin office, learning about Free Software and the FSFE, while at
the same time contributing to rewriting parts of our technical infrastructure.
Read...

2016-09-14
Thank you for contributing to making the FSFE Summit
this past weekend a huge success! We were excited to see so many
familiar faces and we're eager to meet again soon. Of course, the
FSFE Summit was not the only thing going on in the past month. In this
newsletter you can read about our community's other activities.
In the October newsletter, we will share more
of what happened at the Summit. Stay tuned for more!
Read...

2016-08-08The goal of the "Free and Open Source Security Audit" (FOSSA) pilot
project is to increase the security of Free Software used by
European institutions. The FSFE has been following the project since
early 2014. Recently, the European Commission
published the first round of deliverables based on their
interviews with stakeholders. While the FSFE is in full support of
this European initiative, the implementation of the project leaves us
concerned. FOSSA's first analysis lacks an understanding of Free
Software; it includes several factual errors; and it was based on poorly
conducted general interviews. FSFE President Matthias Kirschner and
FSFE Fellowship
Representative Mirko Böehm, who were both interviewed for the project,
have summarised the most evident shortcomings in the recent
FOSSA publications. However, looking from another perspective: FOSSA is
still in its first stages and with the help of more Free Software
experts, we can get FOSSA going in the right direction. The FSFE will
continue to closely follow FOSSA's upcoming implementations. In case you have
any comments or feedback concerning the initiative, please do not
hesitate to share your thoughts with us on our
discussion list or directly to the attention of Matthias Kirschner.
This way, we will make sure that all relevant concerns will be communicated
to the EU.
Read...

2016-07-12The FSFE provided the European Commission with our
input in regard to the ongoing revision of the European Interoperability
Framework (EIF). The EIF aims to promote enhanced interoperability in
the EU public sector, and is currently going through its third revision
since 2004. Whilst the draft version gives preference to Open Standards in delivering public services, it also
promotes harmful FRAND (so-called "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory")
licensing terms for standards. In practice, these are
highly anti-competitive and unfit
not only for Free Software but for the whole software sector in general.
In addition, the draft also ignores the proven relationship between
interoperability and Free Software: many national frameworks explicitly
require
their national services to be based on Free Software. We
asked the European
Commission to address these and other shortcomings and ensure interoperability
in an efficient way.
Read...

2016-06-06FSFE together with 72 organisations
signed
a letter to the EU telecom regulators in support of strong net neutrality
rules in the on-going negotiations for the guidelines on the implementation
of the recently adopted EU Regulation 2015/2120. The Regulation creates a
basis for strong net neutrality, and FSFE together with other organisations
from all over the world asks the Body of European Regulators of Electronic
Communication (BEREC) and the 28 national telecom regulators to uphold
these rules and to establish strong net neutrality guidelines around Europe.
Read...

2016-05-02As a part of the Digital Single Market strategy, the European Commission
has published
the communication on ICT standardisation priorities as one of the
key factors in the digital economy. FSFE welcomes the overall approach
taken in the communication in favour of more open standards and a greater
inclusion of Free Software communities into standardisation processes.
Read...

2016-04-01We published our position on the Radio Equipment Directive 2014/53/EU
(adopted in May 2014) that demands from device manufacturers to check each
device software's compliance. At first sight, this may sound reasonable
but it has highly negative implications on user rights and Free Software,
fair competition, innovation, environment, and volunteering – mostly
without large benefits for security. The directive needs to be implemented
in member states before 13 June 2016. We have formulated several proposals
to EU institutions and EU member states with concrete steps to solve
these issues.
Read...

2016-03-02For the 6th time in a row we asked everyone to express their gratitude
and appreciation towards Free Software contributors on Valentine's Day.
Check out our #ilovefs 2016 report and see who got acknowledged
this year through countless blog posts, pictures, artwork, memes, personal
notes and many more. Don't forget to mark next year's 14 February as
"I love Free Software" Day to continue this nice tradition of acknowledging
the people and hard work of everyone behind Free Software. We thank all
participants who found time to say "thank you" and for making #ilovefs
2016 such a success!
Read...

2016-01-28In 2016, the Free Software Foundation Europe is looking forward towards
an exciting year. This is the year when we are celebrating our 15th birthday
and that will give us the chance to look back, to see and show how your
support brought us here. However, we are also looking forward to mastering
the challenges ahead.
Read...

2015-12-07The European Parliamentary committees for Internal Market and Consumer
Protection (IMCO) as well as Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) issued
their joint own-initiative report based on the Commission's Digital Single
Market Strategy. FSFE's policy team analysed their report and proposed
changes to include standards that are open, minimalistic, and implementable
with Free Software, to integrate users' control over their data and to
make sure that the single open science cloud is implemented with
Free Software.
Read...

2015-11-09In the end of October, FSFE
provided its recommendations
to the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy, a roadmap
for European policy in digital age aimed at bringing down regulatory barriers
between 28 different national markets. In particular, the Commission has set goals to digitalise European industries, to develop standards for “the cloud”, “the Internet of Things”, and big data, and to further enhance digital education.
Read...

2015-10-05At this year's General Assembly in Bucharest, the FSFE
elected a new leadership team
for the next two years. Reinhard Müller will continue his role as
Financial Officer while your editor will assume the role as President,
with Alessandro Rubini filling in as Vice-President. Alessandro is an
electronic engineer working on device drivers and embedded systems.
He was one of the first members of the FSFE and recently joined again
to support us in our work. The FSFE's former President, Karsten Gerloff
welcomed
the change and wrote about his future steps.
Read...

2015-09-07Nowadays we use online services for everything and
increasingly provide our data to them. However we also lose the control
of our own data more than ever. Together with other organisations
FSFE supports the
publication of the User Data Manifesto 2.0 which promotes users'
basic rights to control their data while using online services. According
to the manifesto, users must control the access to their data, they have
to know if their data is stored by the online services, and they have to
be able to freely choose a platform without being forced to vendor lock-in.
The manifesto is a good starting point for the debate about users' rights
online, and FSFE looks forward to other organisations joining the effort
to stand for online services that respect users' fundamental rights.
Read...

2015-08-04In our answer, we restate several issues that need to be addressed in the
overall topic of the consultation. For example on software patents we explained
that it is impossible to procure software that is not violating any patents,
and that the rights of copyright holders should not be devalued by third
parties’ patents. In addition, FSFE argued that every publicly funded software
should be published and distributed as Free Software by default, so that
everyone can use the software for their own purposes and provide better
services for public authorities in return.
Read...

2015-07-06While looking into the Digital Single Market (DSM) package,
our president Karsten Gerloff noticed that the EU Commissioner Günther
Oettinger neglected to publish his recent meetings with lobbyists. So Karsten
reminded the Commission about their transparency commitment. Meanwhile
Oettinger's Head of Cabinet, Michael Hager, explained that a long-term sickness
leave in the cabinet has led to a delay in publishing the meetings, and they
updated the lists of meetings.
Read...

2015-06-05
On the first Wednesday of May, a coalition of digital liberties
organizations, including FSFE, and a multitude of individual activists
held the
International Day Against DRM 2015
to raise awareness about digital restrictions management, a pervasive
and deeply entrenched mechanism designed to plunder the citizenry of
the concept of ownership.
Read...

2015-05-04The European Commission has published a new version of its
strategy for the internal use of Free Software. The FSFE provided input to the
Commission during the update phase and while the strategy is broadly similar to
the previous version, there are some
improvements.
Read...

2015-04-04Our new Executive
Director Jonas Öberg gave a talk at Libreplanet, and visited Boston to meet
FSF board members and staff. In his
blog posts he wrote about his meetings with Matthew Garret, Benjamin Mako
Hill, Bradley Kuhn, Henry Poole from FSF's board, FSF's staff as well as FSF's
Executive Director John Sullivan discussing how to improve cooperation and the
two main challenges he sees for FSFE:
Read...

2015-03-04We believe that proprietary standards and software patents are barriers to
Free Software adoption. To get rid of those barriers we have to help the public
administration to understand this, too. That is why last month we responded to
a consultation on the interaction of standards and patents by the European
Commission's Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry,
Entrepreneurship and SMEs.
Read...

2015-02-04
Come February 14 and our website will be turning pink and heart-laden to
celebrate the creators of Free Software. We have taken the opportunity
on every Valentine's Day since 2010 to celebrate not only our loved ones,
but also the dedicated people working very hard to ensure that we have
the option to use Free Software.
Read...

2015-01-05
The Earth has once again completed a full, customarily counted
revolution. Here at FSFE we have been busy throughout 2014, working hard
to ensure that users remain in control of their devices and that Free
Software may once compete on a level playing field for public tenders.
More information, including the extent of our limited success and our
future prospects, on both these issues and our other frontiers may be
found in our annual report for 2014,
penned by our President Karsten Gerloff.
Read...

2014-12-09The new European Commission is currently setting the direction of its policy
making for the coming five years. The FSFE is in frequent contact with
Commission staff, who currently see open doors for Free Software in Brussels.
We want to make sure to use this momentum to push for changes on software
procurement, standardisation, and device sovereignty. So our president Karsten
Gerloff participated in several meetings.
Read...

2014-11-11The city of Munich runs Free Software on more than 15.000 workplace
computers and has saved over
11.000.000€ in return. During the migration to Free Software, they
consolidated their heterogeneous IT in 51 places with 1000 IT employees and 22
IT departments. Despite these challenges most
users are happy with the migration and say they do not want to switch back
(in German). And all of this happened in the front-yard of Microsoft's German
headquarters.
Read...

2014-10-06Often there is a tendency in the media and also from us to
concentrate on the bad news about Free Software usage in the public
administration. In this edition, we will concentrate on good examples from last
month instead. So there is good news concerning Free Software office suites:
Austria's Bundesrechenzentrum, the federal government-owned
computing centre, praises the
wide range of application uses of Apache OpenOffice. They appreciate that
the “solution can be adapted to the data centre's needs, integrated in its
specialist applications and also allows documents to be created and submitted
automatically and semi-automatically. OpenOffice is the standard office suite
at the computing centre since 2008, installed on 12000 PCs across the
organisation.” Furthermore, the public administrations of the Italian
cities Todi and Terni
are switching to LibreOffice. They follow the example of the Italian
province of Perugia, using LibreOffice on all of its 1200 PCs and the Perugia
Local Health Authority, which installed the office suite on 600 PCs.
Read...

2014-09-04The freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of
association, and privacy are essential preconditions for a Free Society. If it
lacks one of those freedoms, it is difficult to maintain the others. As a
society, it is important to defend those freedoms, especially in light of
fundamental changes such as the one introduced by the ubiquity of computers.
Such changes can threaten old freedoms and can create the need for new ones. So
now software freedom is crucial to distribute and balance power in society. The
FSFE is convinced that a free society needs the freedoms which only Free
Software can offer. That is, why we advocate Free Software.
Read...

2014-08-04
In the olden days a common citizen of a republic going about their
everyday business was quite, shall we say, free. While tending to their
chores they would occasionally need a new tool or some advice, but the
old Latin proverb scientia potentia est dictated the limits of
their freedom to be the limits of their knowledge: if they needed a new
tool and lacked the knowledge to make it, they became dependent on the
toolmaker only to obtain the tool.
Read...

2014-07-04Imagine you take some friends to a café, but instead of hot and cold
beverages, the menu features information on measures of ensuring digital
privacy. Like "https everywhere" as a starter, "GnuPG e-mail encryption" for
the main course, and "tosdr.org" (information about terms of services) as
dessert. Such cafés already exist in the Netherlands. At the German speaking
FSFE meeting in Essen, Felix Stegerman, our Deputy Coordinator Netherlands,
presented his plans to set up more privacy cafés and why he thinks it is the
right time and a good opportunity for Free Software to do so in other places as
well.
Read...

2014-06-04You care about privacy and you are either paying an e-mail provider, or even
run your own mail server to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over your
email. You do this because you want to make sure that no big company has copies
of all of your personal email. Still, this does not prevent other companies
from getting their hands on your data. It is not enough to merely take care of
your own security, if you seek to increase your security. You have to convince
your peers to increase their security, too: like Jacob Appelbaum says, security
is interdependent.
Read...

2014-05-05You probably heard about the bug in the Free Software OpenSSL nicknamed
"heartbleed". The
FSFE already welcomed the industry initiative to fund critical Free Software
projects, and the topic was discussed in several blog articles on the
planet: Sam Tuke wrote about
his impression, Hugo Roy shared an XKCD comic explaining
how heartbleed works, and Martin Gollowitzer wrote about what
the Heartbleed bug revealed to him about StartSSL certificate
authority.
Read...

2014-04-04The
Free Software in education news for February are out, including an update
from the NLEdu campaign: Kevin
reports that the commercial director of SchoolMaster, the largest Dutch
ELO/student administration software supplier, confirmed that they will roll out
a platform-independent HTML5 version in April, replacing the Silverlight
version. This would make the NLEdu campaign a success as it will allow Free
Software users to access the course materials with any standard compliant
browser. Kevin
Keijzer published detailed information about this matter.
Read...

2014-03-06Although a good data-format can only be an Open Standard, FSFE's Bernhard Reiter argues that
this requirement alone is not enough. Originally written for last year's Document Freedom Day in German, the
article "The minimal
principle: because being an open standard is not enough" is now available
in English. In a nutshell Bernhard argues that the data-format needs to solve a
problem adequately: It should be a good fit from a functional point of view, as
well as on a technical level. In order to judge this, there are a number of
things to consider: efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility,
learnability, simplicity, longevity and a few more. Two central questions posed
are: How well does the data-format solve the problem and --more interesting--
is there a simpler format that could solve the problem just as well?
Read...

2014-02-04First the bad news, the European Commission is still in
denial on their vendor lock-in and Karsten
Gerloff offers good reasons to believe that they are not serious about
using and supporting the Open Document Format. But there were also a lot of
good developments: The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties,
Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), wants
to use more Free Software for their new IT systems. The Greens/ETA
in the European parliament started a small pilot program to increase
e-mail security, running 10 laptops with Debian GNU/Linux. The next step for
them would be to budget to pay for the Free Software support, like the
Parliament does for non-free software.
Read...

2014-01-04
Many hackers (including us, of course!) have been enjoying the various
festivities occurring around the winter solstice. But, alas!, the time
to dwell on Christmas presents and enjoy a family recess is no more –
the Yule has gone, the year has been made anew, and the fight for
freedom and liberty demands our attention once more. Hence, it is only
fitting to begin with a short review of what 2014 has got in store for
us during the next few months.
Read...

2013-12-04In 2005 we started giving crypto cards
to individuals who donated to us and have become Fellow of FSFE. We believe it
is important to remind people about Free Software tools to encrypt our
communications. Besides since FSFE was founded in 2001, we have been explaining
that those 40 digits on our business cards are about encryption and why this
is important. 8 years later, the topic encryption hit ithe media, and it is now
mentioned in every newspaper in Europe. This is good and bad at the same time:
We currently face the problem that media attention is very high but it does
not mean we have more resources to deal with it. We would like to work more on
these issues but we also cannot stop working on other long term topics.
Read...

2013-11-04At the first glance some devices might look like crap. Why should anyone buy
them? Some people laughed at your editor when he bought his Open Moko Neo
Freerunner. You could buy cheaper devices with a faster CPU, more RAM, more
disk space, nicer casing, better network connection, better microphone and
speakers at that time.
Read...

2013-10-04From 27-29 September 22 Fellows of FSFE from 10 countries
gathered in Berlin for the first European Coordinators Meeting. During the
weekend the coordinators got to know each other, presented their work, talked
about possibilities to promote Free Software, shared good practices, and
provided valuable feedback about our campaigns. If you are interested to see
who is promoting Free Software in local Fellowship groups have
a look at Lucile's blog entry.
Read...

2013-09-04F-Droid is a project that
provides Free Software applications for Android via a repository system, much
like most package systems of the GNU/Linux distributions. This differs from
other mobile app markets, like Google Play or Apple's AppStore, since the
client and server side software respect your freedoms and do not force you to
register an account to use them. F-Droid's settings will value your privacy:
although you can choose to enable it, by default it does not show programs
which 1) show advertisement, 2) track and report your activity, promote 3)
non-free add-ons or 4) non-free network services, or 5) depend on other
non-free apps. That is why since the beginning of FSFE's "Free Your Android" campaign we
point people to F-Droid.
Read...

2013-08-06For almost two decades the Free Software Foundations have been working for a
society where the power over technology is distributed. We work
for a world in which nobody can prevent others from learning how computers
work. A world in which programmers can work with each other instead against
each other. Nobody should be forced to use a certain kind of software without
being able to adjust it to her own needs instead of adjusting herself to the
software. Everybody should be able to audit software, to understand what a
program does exactly and what happens to your data.
Read...

2013-07-04Unfortunately sometimes companies forget their responsibility when using
Free Software in their products. Someone has to make sure that
companies are reminded from time to time. That's what we do with our compliance work. After
our volunteers found a GNU GPL violation in a workshop in May 2012, we handed
all the evidence to Harald Welte from gpl-violations.org and his lawyers. They
processed the case and we were now
informed that we won the case.
Read...

2013-06-04No Free Software programmer wants them but unfortunately they are still granted: software patents. They monopolise ideas about software, so programmers cannot use them. In April the German Parliament (the 'Bundestag') has introduced a joint motion against software patents. It urges the German government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. After the first hearing in Parliament, your editor was invited as an external expert to the legal committee meeting on May 13th.
Read...

2013-05-06Every year on the last wednesday of March, Document Freedom Day (DFD) takes place: the global day to raise awareness of Open Standards, organised by the FSFE. It has been amazing to see year by year how the message of freedom and Open Standards has continued to spread around the world. This year, there were 59 events in 30 countries, and many first time participants, including Niger, Indonesia and the United States.
Read...

2013-03-04From February 1st to February 3rd thousands of people went to Brussels to
participate in FOSDEM -- the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European
Meeting. At FOSDEM you have the opportunity to meet developers and
contributors from nearly all major Free Software projects. FSFE is always there
to talk with people about ongoing developments and the needs and contributions
in the Free Software community. So it is a good place to exchange information,
talk with very interesting people, plan future activities, and meet all the
people you would usually just have e-mail contact with.
Read...

2013-02-04Pupils, as well as teachers, must have the possibility to
use Free Software at school. Unfortunately, many of the IT questions on the
questionnaire used to evaluate prospective teachers in Italy focus on a
single proprietary operating system and software exclusively available on that system.
The practice discriminates against Free Software users wishing to become teachers.
Our Italian team filed a legal complaint to
the Italian Ministry of Education about that. In association with AsSoLi, Wikimedia
Italia, the Free Software User Group Italia, the Associazione per
l'Informazione Geografica Libera (GFoss.it), the Italian Linux Society,
LibreItalia and 38 other groups we explain that the country's Ministry of
Education is putting Free Software at an unfair disadvantage.
Read...

2012-12-04First the bad news: The city of Freiburg has decided to switch back, from
OpenOffice.org, to Microsoft Office. The study they based their decision on was
published one week before the decision, which we and
other Free Software organisations had criticised before. Unfortunate news,
but as IBM's Rob Weir wrote in
his article in the Free Software community we tend to look at the bad
news, and forget about the good news.
Read...

2012-11-04Most of the participants in our Free Your Android
workshops are concerned whether rooting your device (e.g. an
Android phone) and replacing its operating system with something else voids
your statutory warranty as consumer. We asked our legal coordinator
Matija Šuklje and FSFE legal council Carlo Piana to analyse the problem. Their
answer is: No. "Just the fact that you modified or changed the software
of your device, is not a sufficient reason to void your statutory warranty. As
long as you have bought the device as a consumer in the European Union." Read throughout
their
analysis.
Read...

2012-10-04After Italy's
new law on software procurement which clearly prefers Free Software upon
non-free software, France also took action: On September 19th France's Prime
Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault signed
a guideline, addressed to all ministries, that the French public
administration should favour Free Software. The advantages the Prime Minister sees
in Free Software, are its lower costs and that it increases flexibility and
competition in the IT market. The public administration should make "an
educated choice", and do "a systematic review of free alternatives when doing
development and major revisions of applications."
Read...

2012-09-04In the last newsletter
edition we asked you in our "Get active" section to help us with Free
Your Android installation parties, like the GNU/Linux installation parties
some years ago. Thanks to all of you, who contacted us about it, and who
offered their help for the future.
Read...

2012-08-04For the first time, the European Parliament (EP) is about to release one of
its own programs as a Free Software. The program in question is called AT4AM,
short for "Automatic Tool for Amendments". The Parliament is making laws, and
AT4AM automates a lot of the formalities associated with the legislative
process.
Read...

2012-07-04The FSFE's goal is to ensure that the owners of IT devices are always
in full
and sole control of them. This fundamental principle is recently being
challenged. For maintaining sustained growth in the development and use of
software, the broad availability of general purpose computers is crucial. This
month the FSFE published its
"Secure Boot" analysis.
Read...

2012-06-04There are two major terms connected to software that can
be freely used, studied, shared and improved: Free Software and Open Source.
You can also find different combinations and translations of those terms like FOSS, Libre
Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to
people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one
term or another and how they differ from each other?
Read...

2012-05-04As you can read and see in this years
report, Document Freedom Day 2012 was celebrated with 54 events in 23
countries and in 19 world languages. It was the biggest DFD in history with
over 26 talks, over 6 awards for Open Standards, lots of other events and the
press coverage counted almost one hundred articles. FSFE coordinated
between all the different events, awarded several organisation, and in Germany
mailed over 370 and called over 170 politicians about Open
Standards. Several of these politicians, from a range of political
parties, did activities
for DFD. FSFE also send out 100 information
packages including handcuffs to suggested people including several
politicians, CEOs, and the Pope. EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes used our
handcuffs in a public speech, which resulted in a lot of
additional press coverage including the front page of the Guardian
Online. FSFE is eager to hear more reports of what recipients of the
package did with the handcuffs.
Read...

2012-04-04A "project" is always temporary, in the narrow sense of the
term. Some Free Software people use "project" to refer to long lasting
initiatives instead. Your editor also did this, until Bernhard Reiter
convinced him to use different terms for people, the result they create, and
temporary concerted actions. After several people in FSFE encouraged Bernhard
to write down his thoughts, he now published an
article arguing: By adopting the more widespread use of the term project,
Free Software initiatives will be more successful. "Free Software is here to
stay, prepare your mind for this situation.", writes Bernhard.
Read...

2012-03-04"7500 dead people in the last year, daily up to 100." That is what your
editor read on the subway news screen in Berlin. While discussing with DFD volunteer Julia
Fuchs what is wrong -- your editors reading skills, his basic
mathematical skills, or the news agency -- something else popped up: our FreeYourAndroid.org campaign!
Unfortunately your editor was too slow to make a picture of that. But as the
German news agency DPA covered the official campaign start, we had a
very good press coverage, so a lot of people read about how you can use Free
Software on mobile phones. The campaign manager Torsten Grote is currently
gathering all the press coverage, please send news and blog stories about
#FreeYourAndroid to press@fsfeurope.org.
Read...

2012-02-04Smartphones are small computers that we carry around all the time. Unfortunately, most
smartphones are not controlled by us, the users, but by the manufacturers and the
operators. Even Android phones are being shipped with non-free software and proprietary
add-ons that usually do not work in the full interest of us. Software updates
will only keep to be available if the manufacturer still has a commercial
interest in your device. The applications available from the official market
are most of the time non-free. Nobody is allowed to study how they work and
what they really do on your phone. Sometimes they do not work exactly as you
want, but sometimes they might even contain malicious features.
Read...

2012-01-04Competition authorities are investigating the sale of 6000 patents from
Nortel, a bankrupt telecommunications equipment manufacturer, to a consortium
of Apple, Microsoft and four other companies.
Read...

2011-12-04Who controls what you find on the internet? Search engines are a vital
connection between you and information. In the eyes of the FSFE, it is important that users can
be independent. That is why we spread awareness about the 1.0 release of YaCy,
a peer-to-peer search engine. Read about YaCy at
our press release, Karsten
Gerloff's blog entry or choose one of the many
news sites who wrote about it, including Wall Street Journal, BBC News,
The Telegraph or TAZ.
Read...

2011-11-04How long should copyright last? Should living beings or software be
patentable? The World Intellectual Property Organisation deals with this sort
of questions. Since 2004, we are involved in the WIPO to make sure they do not
harm Free Software. Our most important demand is that when it comes to
copyright and patents, the benefits should be weighed against the costs.
Read...

2011-10-04FSFE Fellow Michael Clemens has a solution for all of you out there who want
to know when their laundry in the washing machine is done. In
his article he explains how to build get a "Laundruino", based on the
Free Software microcontroller Arduino, which informs you of
the status of your laundry cycle.
Read...

2011-09-04The first day in a new organisation always is quite intensive, many new
people, procedures, so much information. Our new intern Eszter Bako it was even more
intense. She spent her first day with FSFE at the Desktop Summit, surrounded by nearly 800
people talking about strange things such as KDE, Gnome, Qt, GTK, Plasma, Git, QML,
D-Bus, or about how
to build a toaster. For beginners the Free Software community can give a
strange impression.
Read...

2011-08-04Bernhard Reiter is one of FSFE's founders and architect of the original German
team. He participated in setting
up three important Free Software organisations: FreeGIS.org, FFII, and
FossGIS. Besides that, he is founder and Executive Director of Intevation GmbH, a
company with exclusively Free Software products and services since 1999.
Read...

2011-07-04Imagine that you've just bought a computer with pre-installed Free Software. After
some time you decide to install additional software made by someone
else. The vendor that sold you your computer, however, does not approve, and decides to sue the people who made the additional software
that you installed. Sounds like purchasing a computer from that vendor was not such a great idea!
Read...

2011-06-04What would you do with a monopolist, who uses his dominant position in one
area to create monopolies in other areas as well? The European Commission has
decided in 2004 that Microsoft has to provide competitors with information how
to connect a workgroup server with computers running Microsoft Windows. Since
the main competitor to Microsoft’s workgroup server is the Free Software Samba
project, the Commission made it clear that Microsoft had to release
interoperability information in a way that is compatible with Free Software
licenses like the GNU GPL. The Commission's 2004 decision did not require
Microsoft to publish innovative information, it asked for simple information
how Microsoft computers talk to each other.
Read...

2011-05-04882 software patents, likely related to GNU/Linux, in the
hands of people who could use them to pressure Free Software companies and
developers? Maybe in the hands of Microsoft, which has for years used nebulous
patent claims to extract licensing fees from companies that use the Linux
kernel in their products. This month the German and the US competition
authorities approved the sale of those patents to CPTN, a consortium consisting
of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and EMC. But, barring nasty surprises in the still
to be published detailed decision, we neutralised the danger for Free
Software.
Read...

2011-04-04
One room with a bed, a desk, and a sofa. That was the situation when
your editor started working as an intern for FSFE in Georg Greve's one
room appartment in Hamburg in 2004. FSFE started with its operations
in March 2001 as the first
sister organisation of the FSF in the US. We have come a
long way since then.
First of all, our interns don't get Georg's mandatory cooking lessons any more,
instead they now have their own desks and do not have to work from the
sofa any more. Second, we now have the Fellowship which leads to a growth
of volunteers and activities:
Read...

2011-03-04"On 27th January facebook was shut down in Egypt. For the
moment this stopped the protests. Media assumes that this is due to the
influence of Mubarak's granddaughter who is Mark Zuckerberg's girl-friend." Of
course this is not true. But with software which is controlled by one company,
something like this can happen. What if the owner of the social network would
have been an Egypt company? Would this company have been able to resist state
pressure?
Read...

2011-02-04
Videos on the internet often prove to be literal nuisance to Free Software users. Several websites required the non-free flash video plugin to view videos. Perhaps also your friends were wondering why you are not able to watch youtube videos within your web browser, and thought you are a freak when you started downloading videos with youtube-dl. With gnash and other programs which are able to play flash video directly the situation improved. But flash is still a pain annoying both for Free Software users and developers.
Read...

2011-01-04Their mission is to bring Free Software into schools
and universities. Their new task is to gather information about their
stakeholders, and create
targeted leaflets. And I am sure the favourite colour of the
coordinators Thomas
Jensch and Guido Arnold
is Fellowship green. That's our education team.
Read...

2010-12-04This edition covers the current developments in Open Standards policy, some
basic information about software patents, an update from FSCONS about
distributed computing, and how you can support us in the end of the year.
Read...

2010-11-04This edition explains how we counter the lobby work of
proprietary organisations at the European level, what we do at the United
Nations level to inform more people about the dangers of software patents, what
we are doing to get rid of non-free software advertisement on public websites,
and what you can do to make a change.
Read...

2010-10-04In this edition we discuss the misleading term "fair, reasonable
and non-discriminatory terms" (FRAND), we explain what we are doing about centralised
computer systems and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and update you on our
current campaign to end non-free software commercials by public institutions.
Read...

2010-09-04In this edition we are covering Free Software in education,
distributed Free Software solutions as alternative to centralised services,
some ways to celebrate what we -- the Free Software community -- already
achieved, and how you can participate in the European football championship
even if you are not interested in football.
Read...

2010-08-04The focus of this edition is Free Software in the public
sector: on a national level within the United Kingdom, in the Italian region of
Bozen, and in the Austrian city of Linz. We introduce a new definition of
mnemonic Open Standards, and invite you to participate in upcoming local Free
Software events.
Read...

2010-07-04This edition covers Neelie Kroes' statement about Open
Standards, the Free Software discussion in Saxony (Germany), and the
relicensing of WebM to be GPL compatible, and asks you all to keep in touch
with your politicians about Free Software issues.
Read...

2010-06-04May was quite busy, for the first time we
participated in a big church event to inform visitors about Free
Software. We analysed the European Commission's Digital Agenda, and
there was news about free video formats.
Read...

2010-02-09In January, FSFE was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal as a "trendsetting
organisation". This recognition for the hard work of the past years was a
good start into the new year.
Read...

2010-01-10Despite the temperatures dropping below zero all over Europe and the
Christmas holidays approaching, FSFE kept working as usual for software
freedom. The major news of December are that we have begun to
restructure our website, added Andreas Tolf Tolfsen as webmaster deputy
coordinator, and published a statement on the EC's settlement with
Microsoft in the browser antitrust case. Read on to learn more about
what we did in December.
Read...

2009-12-12November: another month full of activities and work to do for FSFE.
Among other things we launched the Fellowship grant project, fought for
Open Standards in the European public sector, had an excellent time at
the FSCONS in Sweden, and participated in WIPO to ensure that Free
Software principles are respected. To keep FSFE strong and independent,
we have launched our year-end fund raising campaign: Cooking for Freedom.
Read...

2009-11-13October has been a dense, vibrant and challenging month for FSFE.
We have done more work than will fit the limits of this letter.
For this reason, after reading the newsletter, please visit the
news section of our website to have a complete overview of our
work:
Read...

2009-10-12The Software Freedom Day is one of the main events in the Free Software
community in September, and it is an event we never miss: this year FSFE
celebrated in Leipzig, Vienna and Hamburg with the help of our Fellows.
Thanks to them, the campaign "Ask your candidate about Free Software!" for
the German elections became a great success.
Read...

2009-09-14August traditionally is a month with a lower level of activity due to
holidays. Still, a lot of things happened under FSFE's and the
Fellowship's roofs.
Read...

2009-08-13This month has been full of activity, but one bit of news has cast a
shadow over it all. We have learned of the death of Richard Rothwell,
who was a prominent and respected advocate for Free Software in
education and a Fellow. We are saying farewell to him below.
Read...

2009-07-09June has definitely been a thrilling month. Besides our ongoing
activities with Fellowship meetings, participations to events such as
the LinuxTag in Berlin, most of our energy and attention were directed
at the General Assembly (GA) held in Miraflores de la Sierra.
Read...

2009-06-09May has been an hot month for us. Not only because the first real sunbeams
start showing up all-over Europe, but mainly because during the whole month
we run our first-ever voting process to elect a Fellow representative to FSFE
General Assembly (GA). Moreover, we published our call for applications as
coordinator and staff positions in our legal department, and our Austrian
team concluded its challenging and satisfying tour across the whole Austria,
by participating to "Linuxwochen Eisenstadt".
Read...

2009-05-11Do you know one thing that makes Free Software sustainable? You! Yes, it
is your support that allows us to operate across the whole Europe and at
different levels to promote and defend Free Software principles.
Amongst other things, your donations made possible the planning and
coordination of the Second European Licensing and Legal Workshop. They
allowed the Austrian team to participate in many public events across
the whole Austria and to continue having an intern in our Zurich office.
Read...

2009-04-15
If you were wondering when the newsletter would come back, stop
wondering - it's back! We apologise for the delays in delivering the
newsletter over the past few months and assure you that our monthly
newsletter will now resume the task of updating you regularly about
FSFE activities.
Read...

2008-12-02
October marked the beginning of a planning phase in FSFE. As
well as planning our campaigns for next year, we've been working
on some actions for around the upcoming festive season.
Alongside the internal discussions, we've been asking the
community for ideas when we go to events or hold Fellowship
meetings.
Read...

2008-10-27
This was an important month for Free Software. Not only was Software Freedom
Day held (as always) on the 20th, but this years marks the 25th anniversary of
the GNU Project. Celebrations took place across Europe and our Fellows
continued to support Free Software in local areas with enthusiasm and passion.
Read...

2008-09-24
The most exciting thing this month is the amount of Fellowship activity we
are seeing around Europe. It's great to see more and more local meetings,
giving Free Software supporters a chance to hang out together and share
views.
Read...

2008-08-23
FSFE's activities have been varied over the last month. It's promising to see
the increase of Fellowship activities across Europe. We are looking forward to
seeing more local groups appear and to hearing about their activities on all
levels. One of the most important parts of supporting Free Software is sharing
knowledge in your own community.
Read...

2008-07-08
Housekeeping items are the least popular of all tasks in any
organisation, and any organisation that is working under pressure has
a tendency of accumulating them.
That is why after the intensive work of the past year to build up and
grow the Freedom Task Force, work on antitrust and OOXML issues, and
various other activities, FSFE had some of them as well.
Fortunately, after substantial preparation and three intensive days,
FSFE's General Assembly in June managed to take care of them and send
everyone home highly motivated and with a full task list. The results
of this will become slowly visible throughout the coming year.
Read...

2008-05-21
Issues around standardisation continued to make headlines during April.
However, other important areas of focus were also under discussion around
the world.
Read...

2008-04-16
It has been another busy month for software freedom. Open Standards have
continued to dominate discussions in ICT with the MS-OOXML proposal being
accepted by ISO as a standard. FSFE and numerous other parties have observed
this process from the beginning and have reason to be concerned about the state
of international standardisation. You could read more about this in our
lead story below.
Read...

2008-03-17
It has been an exceptional month. The European Commission has fined
Microsoft an additional 899 million Euro for continuing to restrict
access to interoperability information prior to October 2007 and the
ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva failed to address most of the
serious issues and ultimately ended up waving through the bulk of ECMA
responses without review. Public awareness of issues relating to
software freedom have been raised dramatically.
Read...

2008-02-12
January has been a month full of activity both on the grassroots community
level and in broad topics like Free Software legal infrastructure. The local
Fellowship groups in Berlin and Duesseldorf are very active, and Duesseldorf's
Fellowship is planning to expand to nearby cities in the coming months.
Meanwhile, FSFE and gpl-violations.org have been deepening their partnership
to ensure fair use of Free Software licences in the European area.
Read...

2008-01-16
The last month of 2007 was pretty exciting, with the
biggest news being the release of interoperability information by Microsoft in
connection with the European antitrust case. The SAMBA project has arranged
full access to specifications necessary for communication competitive
alternatives to Microsoft's proprietary products. Of course, this does not
mean that Microsoft's monopolistic behaviour has been resolved. A new
antitrust case may be undertaken after complaints by Opera Software that
Microsoft has willfully distorted the web browser marketplace. It's
also important to note that this does not in any way solve the problem
with patents on software. Such patents are still being granted by the
European Patent Office (EPO) in violation of current law, and the FSFE is
encouraging the European Commission to take actions to permanently abolish
patents on software, both in theory and practice.
Read...

2007-12-17
Welcome to FSFE's exceptionally full November newsletter. In Europe FSFE
has been involved in speeches, meetings, training courses and public
betas of new technology. On the global level we have been participated in
the recent Internet Governance Forum meeting in Brazil.
Read...

2007-11-07
Topics:
Welcome to FSFE's October newsletter. This month, issues of
interoperability, sustainable ICT and Free Software in education
have been receiving attention. There are also changes inside FSFE,
with the Fellowship reviewing its infrastructure and long-term
projects like the FTF European Legal and Technical networks continuing
to expand. Exciting times indeed.
Read...

2007-09-13
Topics:
FSFE engages with irregularities in the ISO voting process,
FTF informal legal network now covers sixteen European countries,
Two days of Free Software in Chile,
The Fellowship site now supports multiple languages,
First distributed Fellowship meeting,
FSFE German Team at FrOSCon,
Fellows of the Rhein/Ruhr area holding monthly talks,
Building the Fellowship in Kaiserslautern, Heidelberg, Darmstadt and Karlsruhe,
FSFE supports demonstration "liberty instead of fear", September 22nd,
Speeches about SELF, Open Standards and Free Software in Argentina,
Free Software and Free Documentation licence consultations.
Read...

2007-08-09
Topics:
Mythbusting MS-OOXML,
First Swedish Fellowship meeting held in Gothenburg,
Free Software on Exit festival 2007, Novi Sad, Serbia,
Freedom in the hills: the Bergtagung,
GNU GPL licence confirmed once again in a court of law,
Submit Free Software projects to the Trophées du Libre,
Ongoing work of spreading GNU GPLv3 understanding,
Tell a friend about the Fellowship, share this newsletter.
Read...

2007-07-12
Topics:
FSFE's General Assembly and the first Benelux fellowship meeting,
GPLv3 and LGPLv3 have been released,
Free Software personal consultancy for businesses,
Six questions to national standardisation bodies,
Georg Greve in India,
FTF useful tips translated to Asian languages,
Free Software in Austrian Schools,
Get your friends to support the Fellowship and FSFE.
Read...

2006-10-05
Topics:
Regional and international Fellowship meetings,
FSFE at the Wizards of OS in Berlin,
Georg Greve at SERCI workshop in Helsinki, Finland,
FSFE at WIPO General Assembly,
Other public appearances.
Read...

2004-10-06
Topics:
FSFE self-conception,
Is Microsoft happy that the FSFE is included in their appeals process?,
FSFE intervenes at the European Court,
FSFE at the Ars Electronica,
GNU/Linux World Expo in Milan, Italy,
FSFE at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),
Spanish press release mailing list now available.
Read...

2004-09-06
Topics:
Announcing Wilhelm Tux as a new associate organisation,
Software patents discussion,
Donating to the FSFE in the United Kingdom,
Speech at the KDE Community World Summit.
Read...

2004-08-06
Topics:
FSFE supporting European Commission in their case against Microsoft,
Widely noticed interview in "Die Zeit",
Writing new licenses often counterproductive,
RSS feeds for FSFE news and events available,
FSFE supports the declaration of Caceres,
Investigations on the impact of Free Software on companies.
Read...